I bought a DVD movie of the newest installment in the Star Trek line this week. Yes, I guess I  have to admit it but I am a little bit of a trekker, trekkie or whatever they call us today. I was 11 years old in 1966 and my dad and I used to tune into the original series every Thursday night at 8:30 pm for the first season, first run of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. (Of course, in the original space/time continuum Spock wasn’t making out with Uhura.)

I will offer a slight review of the new movie here. It was OK, not great, but none of the movies have been terrific, with the exception of Khan. This one  was quite humorous slightly reminiscent of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I understand exactly why they did what they did with this new one in the space/time continuum; however, I still didn’t care for it. OK, that’s enough from me on that…onto the subject of this column.

I got a good surprise this week when I opened the DVD. I consider myself to be a pretty well versed user of the iPod and several of its versions. However, this week I was surprised to see that they also included a digital copy of the movie on the disc. This allows me to “burn” a legal copy of the entire movie to my 120GB iPod Classic. I had not experienced this before.

Of course, I only watch movies on my iPod when I fly. This means that I don’t need many movies on my iPod since I’ve flown only twice in the last ten years. So now I have this one ready to go.

The surprise, other than having never done this before, was how easy it actually worked. It also worked exactly as the instructions said it would; “working as described” is something that I don’t experience very often with most products today. That is unfortunate too but at least this one did work.

If you purchase a movie with a digital iPod ready copy here is all you do. Start up iTunes (yes, I don’t care for it either but it does its job), insert the DVD into your DVD player on your computer. Wait for a few seconds for a menu to popup then choose “Transfer digital copy to iTunes”. After you enter a secret code to prove that you really bought it, the install starts. I also imagine the code registers your movie which should stop anyone else from using the same code for additional copies. That is speculation on my part, but I’m pretty positive about that scenario.

Following a 5-10 minute wait the installation to iTunes will be complete. The next time you  sync your iPod you will have a crystal clear, excellent sounding copy of the movie on your iPod. You may now view it at your convenience – on your two inch wide monitor. OK, well nothings perfect!

I hope all of you have a great Thanksgiving with friends and family this week!

Tags: computer help

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 5:12 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.